Poetry, the poet
and essayist Jane
Hirshfield reminds us, was born in need. “We read or write poems because we
need them,” she writes in Ten
Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. “The first poems were
work songs, love songs, war songs, lullabies, prayers – rituals meant to carry
assistance.”
Hirshfield is
the author of eight poetry collections: Alaya
(1982); Of
Gravity & Angels (1988); The
October Palace (1994); The
Lives of the Heart (1997); Given
Sugar, Given Salt (2001); After
(2006); Come,
Thief (2011); and The
Beauty (2105). She is also a poetry translator, editor of anthologies,
and the author of Nine
Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and other collections of
essays. She’s received enough recognitions and honors to fill two or three
articles; see her entry at the Poetry
Foundation.
It was
coincidence that I was reading Hirshfield’s Ten
Windows at the time of the election. Published in 2015, the book is a
collection of 10 essays on poetry. The subtitle, “How Great Poems Transform the
World,” is somewhat misleading; the essays do not directly address that
subject. Indirectly, however, they do. The essays are just subtler about it.
Like poetry.
To continue
reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
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